Web Conferencing Tips, News, and Opinions

November 30, 2017

How often have you been distracted or even annoyed by a speaker constantly saying "Next Slide… Next Slide?"

This is a surprisingly hard habit to break. When I moderate webinars where I need to advance slides for guest presenters, I ask them to use other signaling phrases that fit more smoothly into the conversational flow:

"As we move on…"

"The next thing we'll see is…"

"Continuing with our next graphic…"

"How does this work? Let's take a look…"

"I've outlined those points on the next slide…"

"Why don't we continue with a look at the details?"

The speakers generally nod their head and agree. Then they start talking and it's right back to "Next slide… Next slide."

Honestly, I don't know of a magic bullet to fix the behavior. It's just something to be conscious of and to practice as a speaker. Make this a part of your personal skills development plan.

This also gives me a chance to once again reiterate a best practice that too many speakers overlook. Have a copy of your slides printed out and next to you on your desk. Yes… I want you to use wasteful, environment-unfriendly paper!

Many presenters tell me that they have a second computer or a second window open with their slides. This inevitably leads to confusion, as they forget to keep the conferencing display synchronized with their own reference display. It is distracting and cognitively difficult to move attention back and forth from one display to the other as you focus task attention on advancing your slides.

Having a hardcopy reference gives you the ability to see your next slide and start talking about it even if there is a lag in refreshing the display on your conferencing computer - or if the moderator is slow to advance the slide for you. If you use telephone audio, it also gives you a failsafe in the event of a computer malfunction… You can continue delivering your presentation over the phone, using your printout for reference. The moderator can continue advancing the slides for the audience, and you don't have to abort your webinar.

Did you pause for a moment when reading that last paragraph? I offhandedly mentioned something that many speakers find inconceivable: Talking about a slide before it is displayed. A sure sign that a presenter is under-prepared is when you hear dead air while waiting for the next slide to show up on the screen. Then you hear a subtle tone of recognition in the speaker's voice as they see what they are supposed to talk about. The slide is the information-carrier and the presenter is just a text-to-speech assistant.

If you are a presenter, you should work at eliminating that telltale pause between slides. Your printout shows you what is coming next. You can lead into the information even before the audience sees the next set of bullet points or next graphic. It's hard to give generic examples, so let's just pick a few illustrative cases.

Suppose this is your next slide:

Don't wait for it to appear and then redundantly tell your audience "Here are the sales determinants." While on the previous slide, you both signal your moderator and fill space while waiting for the new slide to show up with something along the lines of:

"Next, I'd like to introduce some of the key sales determinants we have isolated. The information comes from studies that were conducted over several years, backed by interviews with our most successful sales personnel. Some of these should already be familiar to you, but you may not be thinking about all of them…"

By that time, you know that both you and your attendees are looking at the bullets and you can talk about them. But there has been no uncomfortable and unnatural break in your presentation flow.

What if you need to reference very specific tables and charts? You can't possibly talk about them until they show up, right?

The same type of lead-in works:

"Now let's move on to look at some specific sales statistics gathered from our divisions since the start of the year. I'm going to group the data into a few different representations, so you can easily see key trends."

How about a reference diagram, where the audience can't possibly know what you are talking about until they see the graphic?

Once again, the trick is to set up what is about to appear and mentally prepare your audience for the next piece of informational content.

"I've put together a high-level architectural diagram of the way all the components interact. You'll see that in a second, and it may seem overwhelming at first. Don't panic… I'm going to step you through it and make sure the data flow is clear."

By employing these techniques, you can make your presentation seem more conversational and cohesive. You want your audience concentrating on the information you deliver and its value, not on the mechanics of movement from slide to slide.

November 16, 2017

Nope. You're wrong. This article has nothing to do with the creative process of coming up with presentation content. It's just a quick tip that might make your life a little easier in a web conference, webinar, or webcast. Number your slides from 1 rather than 0.

This is particularly important if your web conferencing technology uses a PowerPoint upload step that treats each slide as an individual entity (a la Webinato or the "File Open and Share" option in WebEx). I see a fair number of client presentations that start slide numbering from 0 for the title slide so that the first "real content" slide comes out as number 1. The problem is that the slide navigation controls in the webinar product number the slides from 1. So if a presenter wants to show what she thinks of as slide 23, she has to select slide 24 from the webinar navigation controls.

It's not going to make or break a presentation, but if the slide numbers are consistent everywhere you see them, it's one less thing you have to explain to someone coming in and trying to master the technology.

I started to write that if you show your slides in a web conference via screen sharing (a la GoToMeeting or Zoom), you can ignore this tip. But it turns out that PowerPoint itself is subject to the same navigation problem!

You may be familiar with the fact that when displaying slides in Slideshow Mode, you can jump directly to any slide by typing the slide number and pressing the Enter key. If you try this trick with slides that start from 0, you end up off by one. As a matter of fact, typing 1<Enter> or 0<Enter> both bring you to the title slide.

If you don't know how to change the starting slide number, it's because Microsoft hides the control in a ridiculously non-intuitive spot. In PowerPoint 2016, go to the Design tab and click on Slide Size. Choose the option for "Custom Slide Size…" and you will find the entry for "Number slides from:"

You'll have to ignore the fact that slide numbering has nothing to do with slide size. They just couldn't figure out anywhere else to put it.

Whether or not to show slide numbers on your presentation slides is an entirely different discussion. I'm generally against it except in training and reference situations where you expect participants to ask you to return to specific slides in order to discuss examples and information.

November 13, 2017

I can't believe it has been nine years since I wrote one of my most controversial blog posts. In 2008 I asked "Can You Charge For Webinars?" It started a firestorm that still gets hits to this day. I felt obligated to publish a second post trying to clarify the fact that I didn't believe webinars should always be free… It is perfectly reasonable and appropriate to charge for products, services, and delivered value in any context… including webinars.

One of my colleagues recently posted a deceptively simple question on a Facebook group for webinar professionals: "What webinar platforms have strong ecommerce solutions?" As with most business concepts, it's hard to craft an answer without acknowledging the many different ways that companies might want to make money from their webinars. Let's see if we can break it down and formalize requirements.

I'm going to eliminate content marketing and lead generation from this discussion. We'll concentrate purely on direct and immediate revenue generation associated with webinars.

1) The first thing most people think about is charging admission to attend an upcoming live webinar. The sale is likely to occur through one or more of the following channels:

Integrated as a step in the web conferencing company's webinar registration process

So a webinar product that collects admissions during registration might satisfy some of its clients, but certainly not all! Vendors should formalize APIs or planning guides that explain how to best use their product with any of these payment collection methodologies.

2) Once you know how you're getting your money, you have to determine how much money you will get. Considerations include:

Offering pricing tiers or discounts for different population segments

Being able to repeatedly test the payment/registration process

Giving out complimentary registrations if necessary

How much the payment processor takes (percentage based on charged price, fixed amount based on registration count, fixed amount per event?)

When do you get your portion of collected funds (at time of sale, transferred to your account in a lump sum at a later time?)

3) The next wrinkle in the process is protecting your revenue stream. Can you prevent one person from paying and then sharing their login information with other parties?

4) And finally, what is your dispute resolution process? If a paid participant is unable to join the session for whatever reason, will you refund their money? Do you have a methodology in place for managing the mechanics? How much will you lose by "eating the costs" you were charged by your payment processor when the sale was initially made?

5) Now it's time to figure out how to deal with charging for recorded content. Some webinar products that integrate payment processing into upcoming event registration don't extend that mechanism to registering and paying to watch a recording. Can you support the following scenarios?

A registrant pays and attends the live webinar, then wants to review it on a recording without paying again

A registrant pays and doesn’t attend the live webinar, but wants to watch the recording without paying again

Someone does not register for the live webinar, but wants to pay and receive access to the recording later

Someone pays and starts watching the recording, but has to stop in the middle… Can they re-watch without paying again?

And over all of this hangs the same specter of securing your revenue stream… How do you stop a customer from sharing the viewing link with others? In many cases, your best strategy may be to produce your recording as a standard audio/video file and upload it to a service that manages pay-per-view mechanics for you. Vimeo is one of the best known, but there are many, many third party streaming video hosting sites that will let you charge to serve up content.

You can see how the product features you look for will vary based on the way you want to do business with your viewing population. But we're still not done. Now we need to look at revenue collection from within the presentation!

6) Can you make sales during your webinar? If the point of your webinar is to sell a book or a consumer product or a service subscription, you probably don't want to charge admission to view the pitch. Instead, you want to complete a sale while the prospect is watching and listening to you. Sure, you can provide a link to an external website that manages the sale, but many people believe that you can be more effective with an order button that works from within the webinar platform itself to let the prospect fill in the required information and complete the payment process without leaving the webinar. This is less common among the big name enterprise webinar products geared more towards marketing and training. You may have better luck finding the capability in BtoC-oriented webinar products that target very small or sole-proprietor businesses.

If you want to let customers purchase from inside the webinar platform, think carefully about how this translates to on-demand viewings. Will your ordering button be active in the recording? Do you need to change the call to action for on-demand viewers? If you transfer the recording to a streaming video portal site, you may need to do extra post-production work to overlay an active web link where your order button was during the live webinar. Don't leave this to chance… Plan your strategy before your live webinar so you will know how to encourage action for all listeners.

I would like to see more webinar vendor announcements in 2018 covering these use cases. Webinars are a business tool, and a serious part of doing business is driving direct revenue-collection activities. Vendors have left the planning and execution as an exercise for their customers for too long. It is time to put revenue recognition as a priority feature requirement in full parity with collaboration and feedback capabilities.

November 08, 2017

I have put together a 12-part series of short videos exploring different facets of webinar production and delivery. You can access the YouTube playlist at bit.ly/webinarsintro or you can view an index page with titles and descriptions at www.wsuccess.com/downloads.html, allowing you to jump to whatever subject interests you.

Each topic is presented as a high-level introduction to key considerations for people just getting started with webinars. The videos are only 2-3 minutes long, so obviously I don't go into a lot of detail. If you are an experienced webinar professional, you won't find advanced insights or tips. But it's a great way to give newcomers some background and general orientation to the things they'll need to think about as they begin planning their webinar activities. Feel free to share the link with someone who wants to understand what's involved with putting on a webinar!

The first part of the announcement concerned a new offering labeled GoToStage. Launched for the time being as a beta release, GoToStage acts as a searchable repository for recorded presentation content. Companies can upload video presentations that can be accessed and viewed by the public. In addition to the master public repository, companies can create their own branded "channel pages" featuring their content.

Admittedly, this is not much different from YouTube or Vimeo, which have much greater built-in audiences. The differentiating features are that GoToWebinar users can transfer their webinar recordings to GoToStage with a single click, in an integrated interface. And GoToStage adds a viewer registration step to capture details about each person who accesses the recording.

While LogMeIn is promoting this as a way to repurpose webinar recordings made with its own GoToWebinar product, I confirmed that customers can upload any desired MP4 video file.

At the moment, use of GoToStage is free for GoToWebinar customers. The final monetization and pricing model will be announced when the service goes into full production mode in 2018. I got the same "wait and see" answer when I asked whether companies will be able to host pay-per-view recordings on the site. Currently there are no facilities for collecting payments from viewers.

Another feature still being worked out is reporting and analytics on viewing statistics. Right now, analytics come from the basic GoToWebinar recording view reports. The press release hinted at more advanced statistics as a feature on the product roadmap.

I also asked whether individual videos or company-branded channels can be password protected in an attempt to hide videos from the general public. Not at the present time, but it is being considered for future implementation.

GoToStage feels similar to a service that ON24 tested back in 2007. The Insight24 experiment vanished without a trace, so I wish greater success for LogMeIn's venture. The most direct competition I can think of at the present time is MediaPlatform's PrimeTime, which brands itself as "The Corporate YouTube."

The second part of the LogMeIn press release announced the publication of a webinar benchmarks report culled from more than 350,000 webinars conducted over the past year. Usage spanned the entire GoToWebinar global customer base, with the greatest usage seen in the US, UK, Germany, Canada, and Australia.

47% of the studied webinars were listed as involving training (16% employee training and 31% customer onboarding and training). The next greatest usage was 29% identified as marketing and demand generation.

15% of webinar registrations occurred 3-4 weeks before a webinar, but this is not tracked against any determination of when promotional blasts went out. My intuition is that you would find that the real insight is likely to be "Many webinar registrations occur whenever the first promotional email blast goes out, which is often 3-4 weeks before the webinar date." The more important finding is that 60% of registrations occurred in the week before the webinar, with a full 33% of registrations occurring on the webinar date! So make sure to re-promote your webinars just before you go live.

Of more practical use, LogMeIn found that more people registered for webinars on Tuesdays than any other day or the week, by a statistically significant margin. So send your email blasts on a Tuesday!

The statistic that was most surprising to me was this sentence:

"Webinars that are 60 minutes attract 2.1 X more registrants than webinars scheduled for only 30 minutes. And 90 minute webinars attract 2.2 X more registrations than 60 minute webinars."

The first part of the stat matches my intuition, but I am shocked to see that 90 minute webinars got twice as many registrants across the board as 60-minute webinars! I have to believe that closely correlates with the higher usage reported as coming from training applications. Training webinars often benefit from 90-minute durations, whereas a marketing or demand generation might not perform as well with a scheduled 90-minute duration.

I am very happy to see LogMeIn continuing to expand both product functionality and availability of useful data for web conferencing users as part of their new stewardship of the GoTo family of web collaboration products. It speaks well for their dedication to keeping the product line strong and growing.